American/Dutch artist Kathe Burkhart is best known for her ‘Liz Taylor Series’, that she has been working on for the past 25 years. A book documenting the series has been recently published by Regency Arts Press (ed. 2007).
This body of works represents more than 150 photo-based drawings, paintings and prints. Shaping the figure of the ‘bad girl’, a notion she initiated in the mid Eighties, Kathe Burkhart obsessively portrays Liz Taylor both in her private and public life. She turns the American actress into an icon of the female condition in Western World at the turn of the eighties until now. These graphic images reveal with humor the clash between women’s sexual emancipation and their persisting stereotyping through the media and Hollywood films.
Kathe Burkhart has been largely exhibiting her work, such as at the Venice biennale Aperto, Italy (1993), at UCLA Wright Art Gallery, in Los Angeles, USA (1994), S.M.A.K. in Ghent, Belgium (1999) or White Columns in New York (2009).
Visual artist, performer and writer, she is the author of Deux Poids Deux Mesures,
2001 (ed. Hachette Litteratures, Paris), The double standard, 2005 (Participant Press,
NYC) and Deux ames soeurs, 2006, (Hachettes Litteratures, Paris).